On 13 August 2015 at 08:46, Myles Braithwaite <me@mylesbraithwaite.com> wrote:

D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:

...

Many, but not all, of these leaks come with advantages to the user. For example, Cortana, Siri, and Google Now(?) may be fun but they are always listening to you and sending something home. Google (and other) search have to send the queries upstream.

Has anyone checked out/backed Mycroft on Kickstarter <

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-an-open-source-ar...

as an open replacement for speech driven AI (i.a. Siri, Cortana, Google Now) that easily hackable?

It's sorta cute, though I'd think it somewhat uninteresting as an "artificial intelligence," basically on the basis that I don't think voice recognition is a terribly wonderful direction to go. Open-ended, but perhaps too much so to do things I'd *care* about. As near as I can tell, the voice recognition in these products has been pretty nearly useless. There are cruel drive-by pranks to the effect of "Siri, find all the [offensive material on phone]. Forward as email to Mom." I'd expect the process to fail because it failed to recognize one word. The awesome wee joke of yesteryear... Q: How many Newtons does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Foux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup. Voice recognition has improved, but it still tends to be laughably bad. The part of Google New that seems pretty useful is the aspect of it having a whole bunch of forms of "useful-things-to-do-with-patterns" recognition that point at various sorts of event streams to output "you might care about this soon". Thus... - Noticing that you stopped driving (due to change in velocity), and noting that location as a probable recent parking spot. Thank you for automatically remembering my parking spot. - Rummaging through mailbox and noticing emails containing shipment identifiers, and pointing that out. Thank you for tracking where my "goods to be delivered" are. - Rummaging through calendar and noting that they're coming up. - Further to that, checking addresses against current location, and warning when I need to leave to get there. - Further to that, checking for traffic difficulties and warning of traffic jams, slowdowns, ad infinitum. - Rummaging through mailbox, noticing emails from airlines about upcoming flights, and reporting about FLIFO (flight info) - For sports fans, reporting results of recent games relating to favorite teams. - Weather updates, including local warnings of major adverse weather events (storms, tornados, and such) This notion of integrating together the "bread crumbs" of things that are worth being reminded about seems to me to be the Next Wave of useful Artificial Intelligence, and it's nothing to do with voice recognition. It's actually not forcibly about needing to share ALL your data with a Google or such; to have your own daemon reading through your email or calendar looking for things of interest is quite plausible. Such processes are sufficiently messy that I can easily see central processors having some advantage as they can be pointed at enough messy data sources to get debugged more successfully than my half-baked wee script. I'll bet there are some poor script writers at Google balking at new emails coming from airlines, but perhaps better that than me deciding to not bother. I'll toss out that a recent "rather creepy TMI thing" didn't have an Evil Central Authority as its cause... - My phone started warning me about an impending flight from Philadelphia to Seattle - As this wasn't my plan, I started poking at why... - Apparently a "Christine Browne" accidentally put my email address as her contact address for her frequent flyer program. (No relation; caused by typo...) - Fun ensues as I'm getting way Too Much Information from her airline about her family's vacation plans. For further fun in the matter, I could have used the access that I was given to muss around with the whole family's seating on their flights. And there seemed to be some baggage-related exploits. Which is a security weakness on the part of the airline, but induced by incorrect authentication information. -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"